Presbyterian Church USA

The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States, established in 1983 as the merger of several national and southern Presbyterian churches. Presbyterianism was brought to the Thirteen Colonies in the 1640s by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland, and a number of New England Puritans left their Congregationalist churches due to their favoring of a presbyterian polity. From 1740 to 1758, the Scots-Irish expanded into Virginia, bringing with them the Presbyterian faith. During the Second Great Awakening, Presbyterians formed voluntary societies which encouraged educational, missionary, evangelical, and reforming work, but it also led to a split within the Presbyterian movement, with frontier revivalists splitting away from the main church due to the main church's paranoia about revivalism's embrace of Arminian theology. During the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, the Presbyterian Church adopted social justice initiatives such as stewardship of God's creation (Earth), fighting world hunger and homelessness, and gay rights, no longer excluding LGBT people from the ministry after 2011. Despite the liberalization of some of the church's policies, many conservative-minded groups in the PCUSA remained in the main body rather than schism. Nonetheless, hundreds of denominations defected to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, while a minority joined the Presbyterian Church in America. In 2018, PCUSA had 1,352,678 active members in 9,161 congregations.